Alberto Acerbi

Centre for the study of cultural evolution

Lilla frescativägen 7B

Stockholm University

106 91 Stockholm

Sweden

I'm an anthropologist with a particular interest in individual based and artificial life modelling approaches.
I currently hold a post-doc position at the Centre for the study of cultural evolution, at Stockholm University (Sweden).

For more about my research see my publications and my publications in italian. See my CV for contact information.

February 2012: New paper in press in Current Zoology

"Behavioral constraints and the evolution of faithful social learning"
Alberto Acerbi, Pierre O. Jacquet, and Claudio Tennie

Behavioral "traditions", i.e. behavioral patterns that are acquired with the aid of social learning and that are relatively stable in a group, have been observed in several species. Recently, however, it has been questioned whether non-human social learning is faithful enough to stabilize those patterns.

We studied with a model how tasks with different search structures favor (or not) the evolution of faitfhul social learning, and how "traditions" can emerge as a product of faithful social learning, but also as a product of low-fidelity transmission mechanisms, as long as behaviors are constrained.

Click on the cover to see our paper.

February 2012: WIVACE - Italian Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation, Parma, 20-21 February

"Regulatory traits in cultural evolution"
Alberto Acerbi, Stefano Ghirlanda, and Magnus Enquist

What are the analogies and differences between cultural and genetic transmission and evolution? In general, models of cultural evolution based on the genetic analogy assume that the rules regulating transmission (e.g. "copy from the majority") are approximatively stable.

Culture, however, is different. We can use many different rules according to the context and, in particular, we can learn these rules through cultural interactions. For example, parents transmit to their children the idea that learning from school teachers is good. Here we explore the role of these "regulatory traits", and how they impact on the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution.

Click on the logo to see our contribution.

June 2011: New paper in Learning & Behavior

"Modeling imitation and emulation in constrained search spaces"
Alberto Acerbi, Claudio Tennie, and Charles L. Nunn

Imagine you have to learn how to tie a knot by observing an expert. If you are an imitator - and you are - you can copy the sequence of actions performed by the expert. Other primates, on the other side, appear to be emulators, i.e. they only copy the final result, as if you had to learn how to tie the knot only observing a picture of it.
We developed a model to explore the differences between these two ways of learning from others that may have important effects on typical human cultural evolution.

Click on the cover to go the publisher website.